Am I a Terrorist Now?: Trump’s Antifa Terrorist Order

On September 22, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization.” According to the executive order, “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.”

Before we accept the President’s words on what Antifa is and what it does to accomplish what the President says is its goals, I want to explore my own conception of the…whatever it is…, whether I am a member or ally of the [whatever it is], and if so, what legal consequences (if any) I face thanks to the President’s executive order.

To develop a relatively objective understanding of Antifa, let’s look at four different perspectives on Antifa:

• Are Antifa Members Domestic Terrorists? Background on Antifa and Federal Classification of Their Actions, which was prepared in 2020 by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which is about as non-partisan as you can get
• Examining Extremism: Antifa, which was published in 2021 by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS); AllSides rates CSIS as a “center-biased” organization, and MediaBias/FactCheck rates the think tank as a “least-biased” organization)
• Rose City Antifa’s FAQs, which claims to represent Antifa in Portland, OR (one of the few self-proclaimed Antifa “organizations” with a website and, according to CRS, the oldest U.S. group to use “antifa” in its moniker)
• Forming an Antifa Group, which is a guide written 2017 by It’s Going Down, a media collective that publishes from an anarchist perspective and which has been condemned by Sen. Ted Cruz and others for supporting Antifa

What Is Antifa?

Antifa, of course, stands for “anti-fascist.” As the Rose City Antifa group admits, “fascism can be hard to define because every fascist movement is different, and the ideology itself contains many contradictory ideas.” With that said, Rose City Antifa goes on to list a set of characteristics that be grouped under fascist:

• Ultra-nationalism, where the nation is defined around a shared racial, ethnic, cultural, or historical identity and excludes some members of society
• A belief in a past utopian vision of society that has been lost due to “corruption” or “degeneracy”
• Desire for (or enacting) the removal (or murder) of scapegoated groups
• White supremacy, patriarchy, and straight (over gay) power
• Authoritarianism, usually centered on a single, charismatic leader
• Antisemitism
• Anti-communist, anti-liberal, and anti-conservative rhetoric
• Opposition to unions and organized labor
• Aspirations for the complete militarization of society
• Anti-elitist, populist rhetoric to appeal to “the common man,” coupled with internal elitism and the willingness to accept support from existing elites
• A self-positing claim to both revolutionary and traditionalist politic

Anti-fascism, then, according to Rose City Antifa, is “any activity that is intended to oppose and/or disrupt fascist organizing.”

According to the Congressional Research Service, “Antifa members view themselves as part of a protest tradition that arcs back to opposition groups in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy prior to World War II. U.S. antifa activism traces its roots back to antiracists who mobilized in the 1980s while opposing the activities of racist skinheads, members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and neo-Nazis.” However, “particular antifa groups may oppose different things based on how they identify who or what is fascist.”

The CSIS traces Antifa’s roots to an iconic incident that occurred outside London in 1936:

That day, Oswald Mosely [a British aristocrat, politician, and fascist] led the British Union of Fascists in a march on Cable Street and Whitechapel in London’s East End. In response, tens of thousands of Zionists, socialists, anarchists, and outraged residents formed a blockade and fought Mosley’s fascists and the nearly 6,000 police officers protecting them. The anti-fascist crowd lobbed homemade bombs, threw an assortment of projectiles ranging from rocks to chamber pots, and tossed marbles at the feet of police horses.

At bottom, Antifa can probably be summed up by the belief that “militant anti-fascism is a reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat that persisted after 1945 and that has become menacing in recent years” (Antifa: The Antif-Fascist Handbook, quoted in the CSIS report)

Antifa’s Activities

It’s Going Down, in their guide to forming an Antifa group, warns that “the antifa name gets you a certain level of brand recognition and built-in credibility, but it also includes certain obligations…” The obligations are:

• Tracking white nationalist, Far Right, and fascist activity: getting, verifying, and publicly releasing information on who is doing what, and knowing the makeup and key players of the various groups that are active
• Opposing Far Right organizing: holding counter-demonstrations to any rallies, parades, speakers, etc. put on by members of the Far Right, removing flyers or stickers that support the Far Rights, and countering their public outreach campaigns
• Supporting other anti-fascists who are targeted by fascists or arrested for anti-fascist activities
• Building a culture of non-cooperation with law enforcement (based on the assumption that “the cops will be Trump supporters; do not collaborate with them”)

According to the Executive Order from President Trump, those obligations have amounted to:

• “Coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers”
• “Routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists”

The guide from It’s Going Down and Rose City Antifa support at least some of the President’s claims. When it comes to obstructing law enforcement, antifa holds the assumption that “the state sees anti-fascists as an enemy” (especially under a Trump administration) and that “the state upholds white supremacy at every level of government, and the police frequently work with far-right aggressors to brutalize people opposing state oppression and violence.”

The Congressional Reporting Service found that “antifa followers tend not to accept that the conventional government capacities will thwart the rise of fascist movements. They lack faith in the ability of law enforcement to investigate or prosecute fascists who break the law, especially during shows of force at public marches, and some are willing to engage in criminal acts—taking the law into their own hands—when confronting their foes or expressing their own ideas.”

Antifa’s willingness to engage in violence is graduated however. As one Antifa activist explained (quoted by the CSIS):

You fight [fascists] by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.

The President is also correct in Antifa’s use of doxing. In a section titled, “TAKE ACTION!,” It’s Going Down explains that doxing is a large part of what an antifa group is expected to do.

Find out about your local Far Right groups and collect information about them, including organizations, names, pictures, addresses, and work places…After doing your research, present information about racist organizing in your community. The information you release should present enough information to convince an average reader that the target is clearly a racist. Information should include, if possible: a picture, home address, phone number, social media profiles, and employment information. Be sure to include organizational affiliations and screenshots showing concrete evidence of racist and fascist views. Follow up the dox with a pressure campaign: call their work and try to get them fired, and inform their neighbors through flyering or door-to-door campaigns. Make sure your intel is correct. You will lose credibility and create unnecessary enemies if you list a home address or work place that the fascist is no longer associated with.

Rose City Antifa concurs:

We’ve found the tactic of doxing to be an effective tool for alerting our community to the presence of dangerous individuals. Members of the far-right often know their violent beliefs are not palatable to those around them and will go to great lengths to keep those beliefs a secret. It’s only when their privately held hate is made public that they face repercussions. As it turns out, a lot of people don’t want to work with or live near a nazi. Go figure!

Antifa as A Threat to the U.S. Government

The President’s executive order proclaims that Antifa “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”

I was unable to find evidence to support the President’s allegation. There seems to be no primary Antifa document that explicitly calls for overthrow of the U.S. government, law enforcement, or “the system of law.”

With that being said, many on the far left (myself included) recognize that a significant percentage of the individuals who work in law enforcement are active supporters of authoritarian and/or Far Right organizations (as Rage Against the Machine sang, “Some of those that work forces are the same the burn crosses“). This is supported by a several academic and journalistic studies.

• In an investigation published in 2022, Reuters found that “U.S. police trainers with far-right ties are teaching hundreds of cops” (I should note that many of the trainers had called for the overthrow of the U.S. government in social media posts).
• The Minnesota Department of Human Rights found that the City of Minneapolis and Minneapolis Police Department Engage in a Pattern or Practice of Race Discrimination
• In 2019, researchers at the Lewis & Clark Law Review found that “police officers have been identified as members of white supremacist groups in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. There have been scandals in over 100 different police departments, in over forty different states, in which individual police officers have sent overtly racist emails, texts, or made racist comments via social media.”
• In a 2020 report titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement,” the Brennan Center for Justice reported that “internal FBI policy documents have also warned agents assigned to domestic terrorism cases that the white supremacist and anti-government militia groups they investigate often have ‘active links’ to law enforcement officials” and that “since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere.”

The guide from It’s Going Down asserts that “the state upholds white supremacy at every level of government.” This is hard to argue with. As the Brennan Center notes:

White supremacy was central to the founding of the United States, sanctified in law and practice. It was the driving ideology behind the European colonization of North America, the subjugation of Native Americans, and the enslavement of kidnapped Africans and their descendants. Policing in the early American colonies was often less about crime control than maintaining the racial social order, ensuring a stable labor force, and protecting the property interests of the white privileged class… [and] There is an unbroken chain of law enforcement involvement in violent, organized racist activity right up to the present.

Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (who introduced a House resolution in January to name Antifa a domestic terror organization) often point to the actions of the protesters in Portland and Seattle during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, but an independent review of the Portland Police Department found that “Portland police and Department of Homeland Security agents appeared inappropriately sympathetic to violent members of the far-right groups, while conducting mass arrests and indiscriminately using less-lethal munitions against antiracist and antifascist counterprotesters…The review quoted a police lieutenant who “felt the right-wing protesters were ‘much more mainstream’ than the left-wing protesters.””

The various reports over the past decades led Presidents Obama and Biden to fund police trainings on racisim and implicit bias, but the Trump administration (in both its first and second terms) aggressively targeted racial sensitivity training as well as all diversity, equity and inclusion program, lending credence to the far-left’s belief that law enforcement agencies default to the protection of white supremacy, authoritarianism, and racism.

This is not to mention the President’s executive order in April, “Strengthening And Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement To Pursue Criminals And Protect Innocent Citizens,” which makes it more difficult to prosecute law enforcement officers who are overly (or even lethally) aggressive in their act of duty, increases the militarization of the civil police (reinforcing law enforcement’s “us vs. them” mentality), and targets elected officials who stand up against illegal policing.

With all that as the backdrop, it seems fair for antifa to presume that law enforcement officers are actively working to strengthen Far Right individuals and organizations in the United States and, in the effort to fight fascism, engage in conflict with law enforcement officers when those officers are stepping over the line.

Additionally, because the President actively supports the Far Right and would like his administration to, indeed, be a fascist government, it makes sense for him to see Antifa as calling for the government’s overthrow.

After all, a narcissist is going to narcissize. But just because he sees things that way doesn’t make it true.

Antifa as Domestic Terrorists

It’s illegal in the United States to prosecute individuals for believing in an ideology. In 2019, the Director of the FBI said, “The FBI does not investigate ideology; it investigates violence.”

Domestic terrorism is not a chargable offense. As the Congressional Reporting Service notes, “Timothy McVeigh, widely considered a domestic terrorist in the United States, was convicted of murder, conspiracy, and using a weapon of mass destruction in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.” He was not (and could not be) charged with “domestic terrorism.”

The president’s order did not magically create a new criminal statute or confer new powers to law enforcement or the courts. Unlike foreign terrorist organizations (FTO), there is no official list of “domestic terrorist organizations.” Where the former makes it illegal to provide material support to a designated FTO, there are no statutes preventing citizens from supporting a domestic terrorist organization. In fact, in 2010’s Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court held (in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts) that the 1st Amendment protects the right of individuals to become members of and/or independently advocate on behalf of designated foreign terrorist organizations (provided the individual does not engage in criminal activities), so one must imagine we retain the right to join or advocate on behalf of a domestic terrorist organization, if such a designation even existed.

With that being said, the president’s executive order was accompanied by a presidential memorandum to the Department of Homeland Security that calls for:

• the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” Antifa
• the Attorney General to issue guidance that ensure “priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.”
• the Secretary of the Treasury “to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund” Antifa, and for the IRS to go after any tax exempt organizations that directly or indirectly finance Antifa
• All Federal law enforcement agencies with investigative authority to “question and interrogate, within all lawful authorities, individuals engaged in political violence or lawlessness [on behalf of Antifa] … and any related financial sponsorship of those actions”

Which means that, while there is no legal teeth to the designation, there are practical realities that stem from it. However, prosecutors must still charge underlying crimes (assault, arson, conspiracy), and our courts must still police First Amendment limits on “coordination” vs independent advocacy.

What About Me?

Let’s be clear. I generally don’t leave my house unless it’s for work, food, or engaging in wholesome activities with my friends and family. I believe the last protest I attended was the Women’s March in January 2017, when my wife and I brought our four year old to Montpelier to protest the inauguration of a misogynist as the 45th president of the United States. We weren’t alone; at the time, it was the largest single-day protest ever held in the United States. I have participated in various Pride parades in my capacity as an ally and provided material support (a.k.a., brought donuts) to labor unions when they went out on strike, but none of those demonstrations were beset by anti-gay or anti-labor vigilantes, so they could hardly be called “protests.”

I have also not participated in doxing. While I have researched whether any of my elected officials (at the local and state level) have engaged in fascistic, racist, or other far-right organizations or activities, and would not be shy about calling them out for it on my blog, on social media, and (when appropriate) in person, I would not participate in full-on doxing, by which I mean publishing personal contact information (home phone, address, cell phone, etc.). Rather, I’d speak about them in their capacity as a public official and would direct interested parties to direct their opposition either at the polls or, in the case of appointed officials, at their public bosses.

With that being said, I sympathize with antifa and look to them much as a 48-year-old man might have looked to the young antifa members who stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944. At bottom, I believe that every American ought to be antifascist, especially when those fascist fucks occupy powerful positions within our civil institutions and within our law enforcement agencies.

Am I a terrorist? Of course not. But I am, and always will be, antifascist.